Speaker 1: So outside of being deviously handsome, there are several core activities that got me into multiple Ivy League colleges. Now, the number one activity on that list for me was science fairs and independent research. By far, the hardest part of this activity is coming up with an idea and getting started. You guys have requested this video, so here it is. I'm gonna tell you exactly how it's done. This video is strictly for my subscribers. I really don't care about how it performs the views. My goal here is to give out the sauce. This is exactly what I used to do in high school and how I was able to win, like, crazy top-level national awards in science fairs. I don't want any NPCs watching this. I cannot be bothered by their comments. The first step is to do research. Some of you guys come to me with emails talking about, you know, Prateek, I want to get involved in research in biology. Where do I start? I'm telling you right now, if you have an idea like that, like, I want to get involved in biology or I want to get involved in chemistry research, that is way too broad. There is nothing that you can do with that and nothing that I can do with that as well. What you need to do is narrow your scope. What within biology do you like? Is it microbiology? Is it immunology? Is it neuroscience? That's what I liked in high school. You need to focus your scope. Now, we're not done yet, but we are laying the foundation. Your next step, once you find a specific field, is to find topics within that field that are interesting. A pretty logical question is, where do I research these topics? YouTube, educational TV documentaries, news articles, science magazines, all of these are great places to get started. Some people think that you have to get knee-deep into these, like, 50-page elaborate publications just to get an understanding of how a field or a topic works. That is by no means necessary. Start by doing things that are a little bit more interesting for you just to get yourself kind of excited and motivated to keep going with this research. But I will say that certain sources are more prone to giving you better topics to further do research on than others. Like, for example, you've probably seen Kurzgesagt videos on YouTube where they take some, like, general science topic and make it super entertaining. Those sources might be better for step one, where we're doing our more broad research. But as you get into step two and we proceed with this research, you want to try to narrow down where we go from more entertaining to more educational content. That's going to serve you better here. Step three is arguably the most important because this is where everyone tends to tap out. Let's say you've picked a particular topic. Maybe it's Alzheimer's disease. Maybe it's encryption. Maybe it's quantum computing. Doesn't matter what it is. You have to learn more about that field. You now have to do the uncomfortable work. The unsexy answer is that once you have these topics around you, you need to learn as much as you can about those topics and familiarize yourself with not just what's going on right now, but what exactly scientists are working to advance in that field. This is when you start reading research papers and research articles to truly understand what scientists are doing. You don't need to read papers fully from front to back. A lot of times, just reading the abstract is enough if they do a good job giving a summary or even just skipping down to the results section and seeing what happened. But what you absolutely should be doing is taking notes and saving any really, really good papers that you like actually enjoyed or furthered your understanding of a certain topic, or maybe they were just very novel, like a lot of other papers are citing this particular paper. Through these notes, you're going to start organizing what particular problems and challenges you're seeing, like what things scientists are tackling, what's standing out to you, and then also what kind of ideas seem popular. Is there a particular type of Alzheimer's treatment that people are working on? One particular strain of some bacteria that they're testing with? What are those key ideas that you're taking away from doing all of this research? The reason that people fail here is because when you go to read your first paper, I'm telling you right now, you're going to open it up and it's going to make no sense. You're going to read the title. It's going to be some crazy fancy words that you don't know. You're going to go read the abstract and nothing is going to go into your head. That's just how it goes. I've had people ask me if there's a way to make this part easier, and here's the way I tend to think about it, okay? Imagine you're going to the gym, right? We have a 10-pound dumbbell here and you're doing your bicep curls, right? You're going to keep doing these curls and you're going to start to feel a little bit of a burn in your arm. Now, imagine if you look at me dead in the eyes while you're doing your curls and you ask, Prateek, is there a way that I can get my bicep gains without feeling the burn? The better way to look at it is that if you keep doing these bicep curls today, you push to failure, you're only going to be able to do 10. But then you come back tomorrow and now you can do 15. You come back the next day, now you can do 20. And boom, before you know it, you're an amateur researcher in a field. You are very familiar with what's going on and you are equipped to enter the next step. A bonus tip I have for you guys, once you run into terminology that you don't know, even if it's three words in a sentence, go look it up, understand what it means, and then make some notes about it. As you keep learning more and more terminology, more technical jargon, and you start to understand what these words mean, how they connect to one another, and what's generally going on in these papers, as you continue doing your research, it becomes easier. Eventually, you get to a point where you actually have enough understanding of what's going on, very technically speaking, that you can truly decipher a paper. Front to back, you understand what's going on. And once you get to that stage, that's when this research process actually becomes fun. Step four is the implementation. This is where the research that you probably imagined in your head when you clicked on this video actually begins. What you need to do is start identifying the problems in a field that scientists are attempting to solve. You don't need to come up with any solutions here yet. Just start listing out the different challenges that you see. The good news is, if you're already following this pathway and you're on step three, this should just come naturally. Yes, you're going to run into some papers that are like literature reviews, or they're very, very introductory, just kind of getting you into the material. But most of the papers you read at this stage should be very technical, very focused on some particular goal or some research they're doing, something that they're trying to improve. Those are the papers you want to use as inspiration to try to come up and see with what these scientists are actually working on. What is interesting and relevant to them and their eyes? And what can you make notes about? Let me give you an example to make this super clear. Let's say you're interested in leukemia or blood cancer. One of the challenges that I noticed that scientists face when they're working with patients and people who have leukemia is that diagnosing the disease is very, very difficult, especially until leukemia has spread a lot further in the body. There are a ton of other issues with leukemia in regards to relapses during remission or issues with treatment that you as a student researching leukemia definitely should have made note of. But let's just say this diagnosis part was what stood out to you. Now you can start to form the basis of a research question. Is there a way we can improve the diagnosis speed of leukemia? Or perhaps the variable that you want to explore is accuracy. So can we improve the accuracy of current methods? Or maybe you want to explore false positive rates, which is basically the rate at which people are accidentally diagnosed with leukemia. Or maybe not at all. There's so many different pathways you can go down here. And notice that, you know, me personally, I'm no expert on leukemia. I just looked into this for the video and I came up with this many ideas in just a day. There are so many directions that you can go down. I hope you're starting to understand now why we focused so much earlier on narrowing your search. It's because even when you get down to a particular topic, there are more angles to explore and to research into than you will ever have time to do. Pick something and then think about how you can target that problem. What are all of the different angles that you can come from? 99% of creators would just leave you here feeling good, like you've really like learned and did something and you're about to go out there and achieve the world. But I'm in the 1%. We're still not done here. Copy time 8. Job's not done. Job's not finished. Step 5. Now is when we enter the phase where we're actually coming up with the idea generation. The crazy idea that shows up on the news and wins the $75,000 cash prize at ISEF. This is where that happens. There are two things that I am now going to say. If you truly want to succeed in this field, I'm going to need your undivided attention for the next couple of minutes. First, movies, social media, and terrible college admissions advice have completely warped your reality and understanding of what research actually is. You can put a thousand hours into staring at your computer screen and Einstein's theory of relativity is just not going to hit you out of thin air. That is not how this process works. Research works by scientists building on each other. Imagine that we have 10 different labs, each working on one particular topic. If each lab is able to progress the field forward by 1%, 2%, 3%, eventually, those efforts of the scientists compound on one another and we lead to the entire field as a whole moving forward and getting to some big breakthrough. That is how science works. When you first start research, your goal can absolutely be to optimize what is currently out there, to build on the backs of what scientists are doing. If you can take an experiment, recreate it, then maybe make some encryption algorithm, for instance, 5% better, or take smoke alarms that are out there and make them 2% more effective at half of market cost, that is totally a valid way to get started with research. It is just like starting a YouTube channel. In order to get to a million subscribers one day, you have to get to a thousand subscribers first. Keep making optimizations, keep making advancements, and eventually you will get to a stage where you get your big break. You come up with some smart idea that takes your project to that next level. Second, we need to be real for a second. You are probably not some multi-millionaire with a full-size biology lab in your basement. You probably like how I was in high school, dead broke. Some topics just lend themselves a lot easier to independent research than others. Coding projects are by far the most accessible of any type of science project you can do, even if you are interested in some very, very niche engineering or medical field, or even some crazy economics or history field, you can make a coding project out of it. The tricky part here is if you don't know coding, and if that's the case, I'm going to give you the full pipeline for what you should do. Let's keep it simple. If you are a freshman in high school or younger, learn how to code. It's just worth it, even if you are not going to go into CS in the future. If you were a junior or older and you hate computer science, you don't want to learn it, I'll talk about a couple alternatives for you in a minute. And if you're a sophomore, it's up to you. Just flip a coin. The other option is to pick a science project where it's not that hard to get access to the materials that you need. When I was in 8th going into 9th grade, I did a science project that involved sourcing like scrap and raw solar panels, which are really not that expensive. It was literally like 25 bucks to get the materials that I needed. And for a lot of science projects within like a reasonable budget, you should be able to get the materials that you want. You can even ask your high school if you can borrow things from them. And usually they're very open to letting you use things like little instruments or little like chemicals or resources that they might have in the lab. You can also reach out to local labs. This is a super valid idea and it's way more effective than actually reaching out to get an internship or something because most professors are willing to help you out if it's your idea. The tricky part for them is that if it's their research, now they have to teach you a bunch of things, get you up to speed. It's like they're doing you a favor when they offer you an internship. But if you have your own independent project and you're reaching out to them saying, hey, would you be cool with, you know, maybe mentoring me or allowing me to use, you know, the expensive research facilities that they have, they're usually very open and happy to it because they're college professors. They want to be able to work with students. That's their job. They enjoy it. What I want you to do if this is the pathway you want to go down is just mass email professors. Ask them if they're willing to let you work in their lab. And then at some point, someone will give you a chance. This is fantastic because if something does eventually work out, you might have access to like a multi hundred thousand dollar or million dollar lab facility at your fingertips. There's so much research you can do there and some wonderful people that you're being surrounded by. Step six is technically to just finish your research, come to some findings and make some paper or presentation. You know the vibes. Following this, that's when you're going to start getting involved in things like science fairs, officially publishing papers, going out to conferences, all that good stuff. I would be more than happy to make videos on some of these specific topics like science fairs and publishing papers because I've done like crazy work here in high school. But just let me know in the comments if this is something you're interested in and I'd be more than happy to talk to you guys. Like this video if it was helpful and to boost my YouTube algorithm stats. Thank you all so much for watching. This has been Prateek. Peace.